Does every Mac with Lion support OpenGL 3.2?

Question

I'm writing a mac application that draws some of its UI on NSOpenGLView using OpenGL with legacy profile.

My app is targeted to OS X 10.7 and later.

If I migrate to OpenGL 3.2, would it prevent some users with Lion to run it, or every Mac with Lion supports OpenGL 3.2 anyway?

Answer 1

OS X 10.7's SDK includes OpenGL 3.2's Core profile, but actual run-time support requires the presence of an OpenGL 3.2-compliant GPU and driver.

OpenGL 3.2 was released in 2008 and OS X 10.7 Lion supports certain Mac models going back to 2006. The Late 2006 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro runs Lion and has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 which is an OpenGL 2.0 GPU.

By that single example it is shown that the set of computers capable of running 10.7 Lion is a superset of the set of computers capable of running OpenGL 3.2 programs.

Note that I'm neither a Mac expert nor an OpenGL programmer, I don't know to what extent OpenGL is backwards compatible. I guess compiling against OpenGL 3.2 libraries is fine, but if you try to use any hardware-accelerate 3.2 features then you'd get a runtime error. But then you should test to see if a feature is supported before using it, so your program should run fine on older Macs provided you make some minor modifications.